Saturday, November 10, 2007
DYING GIANTS
Another one.
Norman Mailer, Outspoken Novelist, Dies at 84
We watch them go, one at a time.
No one replaces them.
I guess this is the essence of aging. Your contemporaries begin to drop and the new culture behind you is barren of any substitutes.
Mailer wasn't really a hero of mine.
I read all of his stuff until it got kind of nasty and rant ridden.
He lived up the beach from us in Provincetown. Where we went for weeks at a time in the East End.
He could be seen on the beach plodding into town.
I never felt like encountering him but I have a thing against that with famous folk. I think it is intrusive and self centered to assault them with my ego.
He was just another old guy. But on the printed page and sometimes in his earlier life he was a titan.
I will remember him as the young pugilist.
